Wally Herbert - Early Career

Early Career

Walter Herbert was born into an army family in England but emigrated to Egypt at the age of three, then to South Africa for nine years. He studied at the Royal School of Military Survey then spent 18 months surveying in Egypt and Cyprus. He travelled back to England through Turkey and Greece, drawing portraits for his board and lodging.

In 1955 he carried out surveying in the Antarctic with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, during which he became an expert in dog sleighing. On a journey along the Antarctic Peninsula from Hope Bay to Portal Point he sledged some 5,000 km. This experience with dogs led him to a job with the New Zealand Antarctic programme which commissioned him to purchase dogs in Greenland for the Antarctic. There he learnt Inuit methods of dog driving.

As leader of an exploration party in the early 1960s Herbert surveyed a large area of the Queen Maud range and followed Shackleton (1908) and Scott's (1911) route up the Beardmore Glacier. Denied a request to proceed to the South Pole, his party then ascended Mount Nansen and descended a route taken by Amundsen in 1911, thus being the first to retrace these explorers' traverses. In 1964 he then trekked the routes taken by Sverdrup and Cook from Greenland to Ellesmere Island in the Arctic.